Absolution
by SeungSeiRan
Summary: We were never bound for the skies. A story about reincarnation and redemption.
1. The Dream

First crossover fic. Pretty excited :)

Disclaimer: Soul Calibur and Tekken are property of Namco-Bandai.

* * *

The Dream

_Umma_.

Between dawn and the early sun, she remembers her mother had something important to say to her before she died. What it is, what it was, slips out from her mind, swiftly as water over a dam too small to hold it. She has it raised close to her parched lips, unbearably warm from the creeping morning light, close enough for a sip of guidance.

_Umma_.

She's awake, hand raised to block the heat and her mother's words are lost to that sad year when the rain didn't stop falling, soaking through the roof and clothes only thick enough to protect skin. She's thinking now that she's missed something, rummaging through a list in her head to make sure she's warm in the belly from the meager bowl of gruel she's supposed to have had sometime ago. _Then_, she remembers and re-corrects herself. That it's twenty years past since she's had to forget what her mother told her, what her brother's name was, that she might have to mourn again for her choice to survive.

She's waking up on a grassy loft overlooking a crumbling empire and she feels as much for it as the nightingale would have for her dying Emperor. Lessons learnt, stories listened to, all proven wrong with the might of one tainted blade and a ripple of change that shakes her awake in the morning instead of the old childish chilblains. The cure lies in this curse of hers, regressing into memories that have shrunk smaller than her thumb-nail, allowing her to feel littler than she is and reminding herself that she is but one blade too. Sharp, swinging out of bearing and loose as a cannon-ball on the wrong tangent.

"Umma."

There is no one to answer her hidden question, no one who remembers the dreams she dreams with her. Blurring, not with tears, her eyes travel with the arc of birds to the land south of the distant palace dome. Blurring, _not with tears_, her eyes close over the scene, memories spilling from the gash. She whispers to herself a prayer scrapped from pleas lying forgotten at the dusty feet of stone deities in musty temples, _oh please you've taken one brother away from me so please don't take another _–

She sleeps with a hand curled into a fist beside her to remind herself of who she is and the places she's had to fill. With four fingers, she claws at notions of mother and sister-hood, ideals she's never bothered to shine up with a false glow until these days. The thumb is hooked through three rings, linking three roles, three burdens she clutches with her nails digging in enough to leave behind rosy half-circles in her palm.

* * *

Mi-na flies on two feet, ignoring the weight of wood on her back.

Moving ahead keeps her from brooding. A straying mind manifests in a vulnerable heart. Running stops those questions from being heard, even better than being answered. When her feet move her further away from home, so do her thoughts.

Mi-na can tell you a thing or four about running if you just stop her and ask. If you're a bit more patient, she'll tell about the next best thing which is hiding, one of the few accomplishments she can surprise you with even if your eyes weren't straining from peering too hard into hers. Oh yes, Mi-na's a master at what tricks she sweeps from beneath her sleeves, entranced as you are with the smooth tan planes of her bared stomach and the smile that flickers closer to a grimace as soon as you look away.

When Mi-na's not dreaming about her mother, before she was fleeing the sanctity of home-soil and patriotic pride, she was filling in that role by her father's place in their home. Unequal, always a few steps behind him whenever they walk across the training-grounds on inspection. 'Hm', her father would grunt on seeing a misplaced rag on the floor and she would pick it up without question. The same went for broken dishes in the kitchen and dust gathering thick on the door-handles. Pick it up, clean up this mess, since she was the unlucky survivor of the monsoon plague. As a child struggling to cope with armloads of laundry, Mi-na had chalked her burden as penance for her sin of survival.

She discovered how to pull at the chain when she was turning twelve in winter. November skies brought scowls to washerwomen's faces, marking their brows with the same lines that mar their hands once so soft and lily-white. So Mi-na considered her birth in the same month a likely sign that she should bring such punishment to her father by merely breathing.

Piece by piece, the shirts she was supposed to be washing tore apart. The old hags had always told her rage and frustration were thorns to be chewed on until they were swallowed to be boiled in the pit of your belly. But Mi-na had done the unthinkable, had taken a whiff of the poison that would go straight to her chest and make her heart want to storm out from its cage. Shredded rags of her father's shirts and robes, she had held them to her nose and breathed in the watery filth.

This is how Mi-na can tell you a thing or four about running. First, she'd tipped over the basin, scattering soaked cloth and rivers of water over their feet. The other women clicked their tongues and narrowed their eyes at her retreating form, that failed bud falling back into the dirt. Then Mi-na may or most likely not tell you of the streets she'd passed and the stares she'd dodged.

Third and fourth are the things she keeps to herself about the feelings of a bird fluttering in desperation because it's far too young to tend to a nest all by itself. She can actually go on counting the numbers by which she measures the time that she wastes, cramped and restless with little need for the usual niceties that keep good girls unlike her busy. She was sixteen when she watched the first boys go to war. It was usually the oldest sons that walked the line since they had the most time left over from their youth. Easier to goad them into war than lull them into peace with bedtime stories.

Hwang had taken her place in the queue to the drafting office and she had never forgiven him since. The Japanese signs of invasion were there. She had spotted at least nine new traders along the coast whose names Hwang whispered as she clung to his shadow ahead of hers. They sounded horrid and chopped up, like they were calmly reorganized for the purpose of resettling in a new land. She could pronounce them better than he knew. When she spoke to herself, her breath was foul with the stench of vengeance.

'_Ni-shi-ki, Oo-toh-ri, Mi-shi-ma…'_

The list went on, each syllable another pierced target at the end of her blade. Her father didn't think her skills worthwhile of a few rounds with his best students, so she had to settle for stacks of rice stalks soaked in barley water and left in the sun to harden. The list went on, another pile of wasted grains and her time untested for her benefit.

When Hwang left, accidentally letting something about an enchanted sword slip, she was on his trail. She had no time to spend on feeling annoyed and left out. It was the second time she was on the run and it was for real. Slipping through Ming, Europe, states that had no name or owner, Mi-na felt it tug at her feet, pulling her through victories and losses.

As she tried to explain later to her father, some hearts were born only so far from home.

* * *

_Snap back._

Mi-na halts to stop and tastes fire on her tongue. It's been a year of chaos so far. With Yun-seong, they've been more fluid in passing. She cared greatly for the boy like a sister would for her brother (or a mother for her son, as the rest at home mutter discreetly).

Only another role to fulfill.

Flames crawl up buildings, roasting already charred bodies and burning the tip of halberd in her hands. The steel must be blazing to touch by now.

_Stupid kid._

Shouldn't have trusted him.

_Stupid kid._

Never should have let him go.

It struck her suddenly how she thought of him as the one who got away. He'd always been a wild kid, from his first time wielding a wooden sword to the man-child storming through life so soon he'd forgotten where he'd begun and that he would have to end someday. A fine pair, the two of them made. This, she recalled with a rueful air.

What had her mother always said about men? Nothing, perhaps. Mi-na couldn't have been paying attention even then. And now _they_ – like her father, like Hwang – remained enigmas, frowning behind their stone-chiseled smirks. If she knows one thing that her mother never taught her, it's that every light has a shadow. A written note aglow in the candlelight, the moon guiding her way forward to find him, the face sneering in her imagination when she sees it reflected on a blade swerving round her head.

So she's a liar. A pretty one, an adept one.

Yun-seong's still just a kid. Boys these days only _thought_ they grew up faster than their bodies could catch up. In truth, it's the reverse. Men _always_ age in reverse, throwing caution aside the older they grow when they think it hampers their ability to reason with the riddles that fate often presents them. They grow old in body and mind, skin withering and bones twisting until they are rooted to their graves. Souls, however, are eternal. Ageless, some were never destined for eternal rest.

A cry shoots up from a distance, then she can taste the blood before she smells it. The old Mi-na, the younger Mi-na would have froze on the spot, hardening ice melting to formless water so that she could slip through the back and make a break for the next horizon. The girl she had once been slept with one eye open and lived off a heart made half of stone.

But she's too late for that now. The sun bleeds into the earth and all the land belongs to the dark.

There's one thing Mi-na can't tell you about. She doesn't think she has felt enough of it for her heart to really survive on it. Mi-na will always tell you she's a fighter first, then a daughter, then a sister… _then_ a lover. Of love, she won't tell you what she knows now.

But if it means that her heart is no longer a stone but a pyre in flames, than that is it. Fate is a terrible thing to believe in when all she'd wanted was to get this life done with so she could finally lay down her blade and sleep through an endless dream. Where the sun will never rise, where wounds do not shine as red as they do on the body before her.

She may have seen this man before on her travels. Too bad for him, she's forgotten his name and cannot respond when he calls out one that isn't hers. He looks strong, steady, even on the verge of death. A handsome face in a youthful body. She may have noticed him once in a crowd but there could be no more room left for any more men in her heart.

Drawing in one last breath, he leaves and she stays behind long enough to close his eyes.

Through the doors ahead, another spark of crimson latches into her sight. Yun-seong is a boy no longer but regressing into a man with each step he takes away from her into the dark.

Locking him with a glance, she flows towards him.


	2. The End

Sorry about the lack of Tekken again. There is a certain theme hinted at towards the end though, which you might like to figure out ;)

* * *

The End

Yun-seong runs like a man on fire.

The irony never strikes him. A boy with hair the same shade as the flames engulfing the tower diving straight into Hell for the chance at a sword deemed worthy of such a domain. Things don't strike him in general, unless it's the tip of a sword skimming inches away from his chest. When they do, it's a searing event, the burn that scars and heals in the wrong ways. Awkwardly patched layers of skin which smother wounds that run deeper than that.

He moves further into the blaze, his grip firm on his blade and sealed by spilt blood.

There must have been a time when he would have cringed at the sight. Of blood, fresh and flowing loose across stone steps, shining a sickly swansong before it stains and mars a makeshift deathbed. A memory erupts suddenly, that of Hwang lying on Mi-na's sheets, sullying the yellowing white with his indignity. Blood spurting from old gashes, unchecked, and Mi-na hurrying to get more water lest her father shouts again. He can now recall the sight of that one eye of Hwang's languishing over him from under the cloth bandage, almost realizing that the boy peeping into the room might be next in line for the same.

Then, Mi-na returns and shuts the door, closing him off from their unaccustomed sanctuary.

The stairs ahead crumble and it's now that he wonders if he has reached his limit. Fate, destiny, the injustice that men older and wiser dub otherwise. His blade quivers in his anger. The storm howls.

Never was he to take a fight lightly. Even the word 'battle' contains a character resembling a blade and its handle. His eyes would always linger too long over that one and the only way Mi-na ever coaxed him to the next was with a sharp tap to the head, blurring the letters to streams of brush strokes on paper. He'd allow her to absolve her roughness with her hand over his and they would move over each written line until he could make out the oblong shield in 'sword', the curved hammock of a bed at the bottom of 'home', and the wall separating the two blocks in 'heart'.

It was really too bad that Mi-na hated these lessons more than he did. She'd probably make a better sister than a daughter. After everything he'd been through, it might still be the only part she would ever see herself fit for him.

The storm roars.

He forces himself to take another step, then more and more until he's running away from Mi-na again; the knowing sadness in her eyes as she watches another batch head off to war a few months ago. It already feels like years and he's aged more than he's grown.

The world suddenly spins.

Yun-seong ducks immediately before the sword splits apart a wooden beam behind him. The moment lasts a lifetime, staring into eyes of Death himself. The warrior king digs his feet into the ground and spares his opponent no mercy in placing the next blow.

* * *

The weight of metal in her hand is the weight of wood breaking beneath her hands is the weight of her world in an upheaval. She wages war on herself and heads into another beyond the castle doors. Too far to regret now.

There's glass shattering, raining on her in a shower of crystal red from the heart of a woman no purer than she was. There's a window to heaven in pieces and the sky is falling from above around a broken heap of ashen gold hair and wide-open blue eyes. Because when Cassandra goes, she lights up the world in a hail of cyan and maroon. Wounds, healed or not, yield no other shade.

There's not even the faintest cry from her fallen friend when she finally comes to rest on the gold-plated floor. Mi-na hopes that the end is absolute for a rebel heretic deserves the finest deathbed for defying pagan destiny.

And may that be her fate as a woman, a sister, a daughter, a burden slung over the back of men already broken from swords sharpened from greed and bloodlust.

Although Mi-na swears no loyalty to any god or myth, she casts one name in a plea for forgiveness for the life she stole from her mother and her brother; the heir to a world she defies for a blade wiped clean with weak tears. The battle howls its way to infinity, drowning her prayer and reducing it to a feeble grasp at a chance.

Even the walls around her appear to sway with the strength she's spent on her salvation.

What could be… salvation…

_Remember the protection in your 'sword', the peace you find when you reach 'home' and the bridge you must pass to free your 'heart'. _

And there they are: words on a tattered scroll. Each character of the alphabet a chapter in their not-quite-story. The one with two beginnings and no end as far as the heart can see. When she stops, her feet hurt from inertia. Her father would have called it 'stillness', 'idleness', or something else to bring her flaws to account. Taking flight up the stairs to the top of the tower is tempting, had it not been for the flames lapping up the wood ahead. Take a step closer and she would be burnt alive.

The sounds of spiraling – blades whistling through air – have her lunging for cover before the tip of one is staked to an adjacent wall. Mi-na knows a sword song – _this_ one better than any other – as soon as she feels it. A fighter's spirit was not one to be heard but one that had to be sought for. Sought after.

"Yun - !"

He bows, then crumples to his knees and collapses.

With a smile belying no sorrow she can understand, Algol spares her mercy and the broken body of the boy into whose hands she'd pressed his sword – his destiny, his hopes now razed to the ground.

* * *

"Wasn't… s'posed…"

"Stop talking!… I'll fix this. I can fix this…"

"No…"

"You idiot… just stop it. Stop talking. You'll get weaker…"

"Mi-na…"

"Just…"

"… 'm sorry. So sorry."

"… shut up. Please."

"I don't want it to end like this."

* * *

It means _I don't want to die_. Mi-na knows. He keeps saying it breathless, gurgling air down his throat like water. He's bled out too much from his wounds. The bandages – soaked, foul, _and useless_ – are redder than his hair.

"No, it won't." He watches her watching the sun fade over the hills. It must be better than having to look at him instead. "No, it won't."

For once, her sentences stop when they're supposed to. Back at home, when she was younger and he clinging to her knee, every prospective groom that came along raised the same complaint: the girl spoke too much when it wasn't called for and too little to concede to their values as a perfect young bride.

By all traditions, she's an old maid past her best. Mi-na's spent the prime of her strength on cradling a dying boy's wasted dream. As he swallows mouthfuls of damp air to keep himself around for _just this much_ longer, he sees the muddy crimson flakes of blood buried deep under her nails. Nails on childish fingers in a woman's hands. The hands that he now sees are smaller than his, those which they'd guided with brush and sword. No man he knows can measure the worth of these worn-out, misused hands.

She flinches like it hurts when he places one of his across her palm. A bruise-burnished pair of paws was what she'd used to hold all those years ago. His palms had been rougher than those of the merchants' sons who'd asked for her hand in return for what everyone expected from her father: a tough back and a closed heart. It hadn't taken her long to find which she was most incapable of.

But she doesn't think she can grin it off now.

"What if… you'll be alone, Mi-na. Who's gonna… care…"

"I will."

"You think he'll – "

"No, not Hwang. Not even father. You know how they've tried. I can't be taken in without a fight."

So she can't. Mi-na's not sure if it's life that she'd rather need in her. Fighting had always been first nature, not living. Laughing, not smiling. A wizened young wanderer, not another old damsel in distress.

Yun-seong's eyes gleam through the approaching dark. They're a light brown, like the copper pennies she'd collected from around Europe. His chest rises from each collapse, determined to stick around. He'd been a persistent kid, the only boarder who'd had the nerve to sneak into her room and pull the clothes in her trunk out of order. He'd even stuck it out through the beatings that would follow. She was a harsh unforgiving mentor who only took note of her faults when they'd cut apart her chances at redemption.

"You're a good kid."

Her hand cups his cheek. They were both growing colder. "You're the only one who used to run after me. When we were young."

They still were. He still would. But… shit… what if, what if, what if…

He'd never cried for his mother and now the tears were making up for lost time. Mi-na's hair and eyes are the color of a bird's wing, what was its name, the ones that used to gather in the courtyard every sunset to scramble for the last few crumbs from the kitchen, he can't remember, he's forgetting what it's like to be free, painless and young and in lo –

"Dammit, Mi-na, get married, won't you? Don't waste your life."

"Why?"

"It's the best…" He rasps, biting the throbbing ache until he has it reigned in. It won't last much longer. "You could be happy."

"Maybe I'd be content. Not happy."

"… You would be."

"Maybe I don't know how to be happy."

"I don't either."

"Maybe I must've been. Training in the morning. Feeding the swallows when they came back for spring. Reading what you wrote by yourself for the first time. Watching how you grew into being who you are… I don't think I knew it then but that must've been what it was."

He turns his head and feels the coarse strands of her hair brush against his lips.

"Thank you, Yun-seong."

And he understands then what she means. He'd meant to say it too, before he'd realized what strange powers words by themselves could wield. There have been so many times, so many moments alone under the sun when he could have…

But she knew now, that's what matters. She'd kissed him, silently promising she'd be here with until him the very end.

In the end, she'd finally understood.

He can smile.

* * *

Hwang finds her still embracing the dead boy on the hill. He begins to pull her away, expecting everything from heartsick wails to her nails clawing at his neck, raging against his failure to save him. Yet she comes apart in his arms, the fire inside doused. Yun-seong has his eyes closed and mouth set, Mi-na is a mute cripple, and Hwang knows he will never forgive himself.

They don't talk on their way home, to Jirisan. She won't be the girl he used to know.

On their third day at sea, Hwang can't find her on the ship. After a dozen hurried inquiries, he stumbles upon the halberd at the foot of the main mast. It almost looks like she'll jump from where he looks up but she removes her foot from the look-out step just in time. She won't look down when she hears him calling so he follows her gaze, blank as a white flag, to what she sees towards the horizon.

It is only a flock of birds. An arc of grey, brown, black fluttering under a bank of clouds.

Nothing more.


End file.
